TCDL 2025

Adolpho Leirner Collection integration: connecting collections across institutional silos.
By: Sarah Long

In 2007 the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston began the process of acquiring the collection of Sao Paulo based art collector Adolpho Leirner. This collection consists of painting, sculpture, drawings, posters, and graphic materials. In 2016 Adolpho Leirner gifted his personal library and archives to the museum to support scholarship about the collection. The goal of the Adolpho Leirner Collection integration project is to create a freely accessible online portal for the complete collection in order to connect the scholarship, archives, and objects to each other and make those connections discoverable. The feat is to link and interconnect information from various institutional silos. By figuring out who this resource is for, what the research value is, and how much time and effort should be invested, we can develop a scope and limitations for the depth of interconnectivity. Working closely with collection managers we created a landing page featuring the details of the collection and linking to appropriate materials. Within each collection we enhanced the metadata in the object, library, and archival records. The next step of the project currently in progress is creating a more interactive aggregate collection hosted in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Library’s CONTENTdm.


Collaborating Across Borders: Preserving the Legacy of Sofia Ímber
By: Rita Johnston

At the University of Miami Libraries, we have been working to preserve, describe, and make accessible materials in the private home of Sofia Ímber (1924-2017). Ímber was an influential Venezuelan journalist, cultural critic, and the founder of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Museum of Modern Art) in Caracas, Venezuela and its director for 30 years. Most of the materials are in Venezuela, are not accessible to the public, and are at risk due to poor environmental conditions and political instability. With limited funding, we hired a project manager in the US and two archivists in Venezuela in 2022, who worked for several years to digitize and describe some materials, send the digital images to Miami, and ship a limited number of physical materials as well. Through Ímber’s daughter, Adriana Meneses, the Libraries acquired rare art catalogs from the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, digitized them, and secured the rights to publish them online. The Libraries created an exhibit, a digital exhibit, and hosted a reception to engage with the community, and continue to partner with Meneses and university development to try to raise external funds for additional efforts to preserve these materials.

We are currently applying for planning grant funding to create a survey of all materials in Ímber’s home to help in future efforts to preserve and digitize more materials, including audiovisual recordings of Ímber’s television programs. This presentation will appeal to those with an interest in managing international archives projects with a digital component.